How Tel Aviv artist Eyal Gever catches catastrophes in 3D

This article was taken from the October 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

This is a disaster caught in freeze-frame. Tel Aviv-based artist Eyal Gever uses software to simulate catastrophes on screen (in this case a shockwave moving through a sphere) and then turns the most compelling frames into 50cm resin models, using a £215,000 Objet 3D printer.

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Gever, 41, became a CGI virtuoso in 1990 through the Israeli military. He began his national service as a paratrooper but developed a kidney infection and switched to a desk job, where he was tasked with crafting electronic simulations to calculate the effects of, say, an explosion. A decade of commercial software development later he decided to channel this expertise into his art, "simulating catastrophes in search of sublime moments", to seek out the beauty of events such as floods and collisions.

To foreground the brutal physics, Gever uses abstract forms -- crashing buses are rendered as cuboids. "I'm approaching it as a serial killer would," he says. "I don't have any pity or mercy.

That's why I won't show you blood and flesh." The simulation tracks each visible particle's trajectory and Gever pauses the video on the most affecting frame. Now, he is realising these frozen moments as sculpture. Each piece takes 60 hours to print. Catch his work at the Frieze Art Fair in London on October 13-16.

Don't miss a gallery of Gever's work below!

This article was first published in the October 2011 issue of WIRED magazine